In the grand pantheon of American enthusiasms—from tulip bulbs to railroad stocks to social media influencers—few crazes have possessed the peculiar blend of scientific gravitas and romantic foolishness that characterized our nation’s turn-of-the-century infatuation with Mars. David Baron’s The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America retrieves this forgotten episode from history’s dustbin and polishes it until it gleams like the red planet itself on a clear desert night.
The story begins, as the best American stories do, with a confluence of technology, ambition, and the irrepressible human tendency to see patterns where none exist. In 1892, as Mars made its closest approach to Earth in fifteen years, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope and observed linear features he termed “canali”—channels. A simple mistranslation transformed these natural formations into artificial canals, and suddenly the fourth planet became not merely a celestial neighbor but a potential homeland for beings possessed of engineering prowess that would make the builders of the Suez Canal weep with envy.
Enter Percival Lowell, that most American of figures: the wealthy dilettante with a Harvard education and time on his hands. Born, as he jokingly noted, on a Tuesday in March—”Mardi” and “Mars” in French—this Boston Brahmin possessed the dangerous combination of boundless resources and romantic imagination. Rather than follow the prescribed path of textile fortune management, Lowell decamped to the Arizona Territory, where he constructed an observatory and proceeded to map what he perceived as a vast irrigation system spanning the Martian globe.
Baron, a former NPR science correspondent, approaches his subject with the light touch of a novelist and the precision of a historian. He understands that the Mars craze was less about astronomy than about psychology—the peculiar American genius for transforming tentative scientific observations into full-blown cultural phenomena. Through Lowell’s tireless evangelism, Mars became populated not merely with hypothetical beings but with an entire civilization of bronze-skinned engineers, struggling against their planet’s desiccation through monumental public works projects.
The cultural impact proved immediate and pervasive. Joseph Pulitzer’s yellow journalism machine churned out headlines like “VISIT MARS!” while respectable publications—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal—eventually succumbed to the fever, declaring proof of intelligent Martian life. Society hostesses threw elaborate dinner parties featuring ersatz Martian ambassadors communicating through mystical translation devices. The red planet infiltrated soap advertisements, Broadway productions, and the fevered imagination of a populace caught between the Industrial Revolution’s disruptions and the dawning possibilities of a new century.
What elevates Baron’s account beyond mere historical curiosity is his recognition that this episode illuminates something essential about American character. Here was a society simultaneously embracing revolutionary scientific advances—radio, X-rays, Einstein’s theories—while indulging in speculation that, in hindsight, seems charmingly naive. Yet Baron refuses to condescend to his subjects. Instead, he finds in their enthusiasm a reflection of our species’ eternal hunger for wonder, for meaning beyond the terrestrial realm.
The scientific establishment eventually rallied, armed with improved photography that revealed Mars’s surface as a patchwork of natural features rather than an engineering marvel. By 1909, the craze had largely subsided, though not before inspiring a generation of science fiction writers—from H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Ray Bradbury—who would keep the Martian flame alive in popular culture.
Baron’s greatest achievement lies in demonstrating how this forgotten chapter prefigures our contemporary moment, when billionaires seriously discuss Martian colonization while tabloids breathlessly report UFO sightings. As Percival Lowell himself observed, “Ideas are as catching as scarlet fever.” In our current age of space billionaires and rovers named Perseverance, we remain, it seems, gloriously susceptible to the same celestial fevers that once convinced respectable Americans that our planetary neighbor teemed with bronze-skinned irrigation engineers, watching us through their telescopes with the same mixture of curiosity and longing that we directed toward them.